Archive for July, 2013

Geez, it’s already the end of July and we’re halfway through with summer? How did it get so late so soon? Obviously it’s the last day for me to do the traditional monthly donations, so let’s get to it.

I realized there’s one project that I’ve been using on a regular basis since my first experiences with Unix and Linux more than fifteen years ago, so it deserves a donation like no other. This project is Midnight Commander, the console file manager conceived as a free clone of Norton Commander, which was hugely popular in the ancient times of DOS. If you remember those times, the two blue panels of Norton Commander must look familiar:

Fun fact: when I first used Norton Commander the panels weren’t even blue, as it was on a PC AT equipped with a monochrome Hercules graphics card and the only color that I was blessed with was amber.

The two-panel concept is an excellent example of a simple idea that stands the test of time — I’m still using Midnight Commander exactly the same way as I used Norton Commander back in its day. For many file operations, and especially for quickly browsing through a large directory tree, it’s my preferred solution over any GUI tool. Thanks and congratulations to the developers!

My second donation goes to the “Unwanted and Forgotten” Foundation, located in ÅÃ³dÅº, dedicated to helping homeless animals (I already supported them precisely a year ago). I’m virtually adopting a young female dog by the name of Melissa, who was rescued (along with her sisters) from terrible living conditions by the Foundation’s volunteers. Best wishes to the Foundation and to Melissa!

It has been a while since I posted an update about the development of the new version of imgAreaSelect… so here’s an update about the development of the new version of imgAreaSelect.

I am working on the project in my spare time, which is unfortunately an extremely rare commodity for me these days (the joys of running a company), so progress is rather slow. However, over the last few weeks I did manage to fix a couple outstanding issues, and I feel the code is now much closer to my next goal, which is a release candidate for version 1.0.

I must also say I never expected it to be this complicated to make the plugin compatible with mobile browsers — while it did require a few modifications to the basic code of the plugin, other than that it was mostly a matter of adding support for touch events. In reality, it turned out developing and testing a JavaScript UI component for mobile browsers is blood, sweat, and tears.

Maybe you’ve seen this picture, it popped up on my Google Plus feed a few days ago:

You might think, surely it can’t be that bad, it’s not that you have to own every single one of these devices, right? After all, there are simulators and stuff and you can do all the testing from the comfort of your desktop, can’t you?

Well, based on my experiences so far, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s bad. For reliable results, you do have to test on real devices. While the iOS simulator that comes with the Xcode suite appears to be good enough for mobile web apps testing, the Android virtual device is useless. Its performance is a joke and makes it impossible to work with anything that requires UI responsiveness (such as my precious plugin). So, I’m testing with two real Android devices, one running version 2.2 and another running 4.2, and I hope the results are representative enough to generalize towards the overall population of Android devices out there.

In addition to that, mobile browser debugging tools are still immature. For the Android version of Chrome, there is a very good remote debugging utility, but no such thing exists for the default Android browser distributed with the system (or at least I’m not aware of such a thing). And although the two browsers should be pretty similar engine-wise (as they both use WebKit and are both made by Google), in my tests I did come across a bug that only manifested itself in the default browser and not in Chrome, and so was hard to track down.

I have also experienced funny things like bugs mysteriously disappearing without any changes to the code (and re-appearing later, naturally), strange HTML positioning problems, etc. At one point, when I was trying to reproduce some weird issue, repeatedly hitting that small screen and inventing brand new profanities, I realized that the last time I felt this level of frustration was in the dark ages of IE6. Yes, I mean it — mobile web development can be a horror comparable to dealing with IE6.

*sigh*

Sorry for the amount of whining in this post, I think I just had to vent. I survived IE6, so I’m not going to give up now, either. That release candidate is coming, I will keep you posted.